2023 Joseph Smith Papers Conference
By August 11, 2023
By May 31, 2023
Call for Applications: Research Grants at the Church History Department
The Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints invites applications for grants to conduct research in its archival, art, and artifactual collections in Salt Lake City, Utah. The department intends to award three types of grants in 2023:
To apply for a grant, please submit the following:
By July 25, 2022
From our friends at the Joseph Smith Papers:
The Church Historian’s Press invites you to attend the 2022 Joseph Smith Papers Conference, which will be held at the Conference Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah, on September 9, 2022.
The conference theme is “Text and Context in Nauvoo.” The event will commemorate the publication of volumes 12, 13, and 14 of the Documents series, which feature Joseph Smith documents produced between March 1, 1843, and May 15, 1844. Presentations will explore themes such as politics, theology, religious practice, gender, race, law, and finance in Nauvoo.
This event is free to attend, but space is limited. The conference program and registration are available on the Joseph Smith Papers website.
By March 1, 2022
From our friends at the Joseph Smith Papers Project:
UPDATE: We have extended the deadline for proposals to March 14, 2022. Notifications of acceptance will still be sent out on March 21.
To commemorate the release of volumes 12, 13, and 14 of the Documents series, the Joseph Smith Papers Project will host the sixth annual Joseph Smith Papers Conference on September 9, 2022, in Salt Lake City, Utah. In the event that COVID-19 conditions prevent holding an in-person conference, digital options will be offered. The theme of the conference is “Texts and Contexts in Nauvoo.”
By July 21, 2020
From our friends at the Joseph Smith Papers:
On Friday, September 18, 2020, the Joseph Smith Papers Project will host the fourth annual Joseph Smith Papers Conference. To ensure the health and safety of all participants, conference organizers have decided that the event will happen online. This year’s conference theme is “Joseph Smith’s Connections and Networks.” Presentations will explore aspects of Joseph Smith’s interrelated worldviews, including race, politics, finance, and theology. Papers will engage with themes found in volumes 10 and 11 of the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers. This event is free to attend, but space is limited. Please register only if you plan to attend; your courtesy will help us keep this conference series free.
For more information on the conference, go here.
By June 24, 2020
This is an abbreviated version of a longer review that will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Mormon History (thanks to the editors of the journal for permission to post this in advance of the journal’s version). If you missed it, see here for editor Brenden Rensink’s JI guestpost on the book.
P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink, eds. Essays on American Indian & Mormon History. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. xxxiv + 372 pp. Notes, bibliography, contributors, index. Hardback: $45.00. eBook: $40.00.
P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) and Brenden W. Rensink have compiled eleven substantive essays that explore themes in the history of American Indians and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Hafen is professor emerita of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, while Rensink is Associate Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University. Most of the essays in the collection were written in conjunction with a seminar hosted by the Redd Center in 2016. The editors’ introduction states that the collection seeks to identify “ways [that] Indigenous thought”—centered around issues such as Indigenous sovereignty, land and resources, colonialism, and decolonization—“interacts with Mormon histories, Mormon arts, and contemporary Mormon practices” (xii-xiii). The introduction notes that previous scholarship has, with few exceptions, focused primarily on white Latter-day Saint views of Native peoples, whereas the featured essays instead reverse the equation by placing Natives at the center of the telling of Latter-day Saint history.
By February 5, 2020
From our friends at the Joseph Smith Papers project:
To commemorate the 2020 release of volumes 10 and 11 of the Documents series, which cover the history of Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints from May 1842 to February 1843, the Joseph Smith Papers Project will host the fourth annual Joseph Smith Papers Conference on September 18, 2020, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The theme for this year’s conference is “Joseph Smith’s Connections and Networks.”
By September 4, 2019
Church History Symposium, 2020
Visions and Visionaries: Joseph Smith in Comparative Contexts
The Department of Church History and Doctrine at BYU and the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announce the Church History Symposium, March 12–13, 2020. The symposium will convene at Brigham Young University (March 12) and at the Conference Center Theater in Salt Lake City (March 13). Keynote speakers include Sheri Dew and Richard Lyman Bushman (March 12), and President Dallin H. Oaks, First Counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (March 13).
By August 6, 2019
On Friday, October 11, 2019, the Joseph Smith Papers Project will host the third annual Joseph Smith Papers conference. Due to the overwhelming public interest in past conferences, this year’s event will take place at the Conference Center Theater in order to accommodate all who wish to attend. The theater is located on the west side of the Conference Center (60 West North Temple St., Salt Lake City, Utah 84150).
By May 7, 2019
We welcome this guest post by friends of the JI Jedediah S. Rogers, one of the editors of the Utah Historical Quarterly, and Matthew C. Godfrey, Managing Historian and one of the General Editors of the Joseph Smith Papers.
In 2012 the renowned environmental historian Mark Fiege published The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States. In that book, Fiege took well-known events in American history and examined them through the lens of environmental history. This approach generated fresh and fascinating insights into subjects ranging from the construction of the transcontinental railroad to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. As William Cronon noted in the Foreword, “No book before it has so compellingly demonstrated the value of applying environmental perspectives to historical events that at first glance may seem to have little to do with ‘nature’ or ‘the environment.’”[1]
Inspired by Fiege’s innovative approach, we started discussing the need for more historians to use the environmental lens to explore events in Mormon history—a subfield it seemed to us that did not self-consciously much swim in environmental history waters. As colleagues at Historical Research Associates, Inc., we had worked on projects for a variety of clients that presented us with opportunities to explore environmental history using a number of analytical approaches. This, in addition to our training and publications in both environmental and Mormon history, gave us confidence that we had something to say on the subject. Both of us recognized that a handful of scholars and writers—Richard Jackson, Terry Tempest Williams, Tom Alexander, George Handley, and Jared Farmer, to name a few—had examined the interactions of Saints with nature, but we believed this was largely an underutilized approach in Mormon history.
© 2024 – Juvenile Instructor
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